RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI SCIENZE SOCIALI - 2017 - 3

Sustainability of healthcare system is a critical issue, nowadays and in the next future. Most researches and analysis focus on efficiency and cost-containment of health delivery organizations, hospitals, ambulatories and outpatient delivery organizations. After an analysis of trends in public and private healthcare expenditure, the paper discusses the limitations of different policies. It argues that privatization cannot be a solution because of health’s nature as a human right that market rules and profit maximization/optimization cannot guarantee. The challenge requires a proper mix of public and private contribution, both on delivery and financing side. The paper point out that usually the sustainability challenge is discussed with regard to the economic dimension, while it implies also the social and political aspects. The conclusive remark is that healthcare systems are under stress, not because they’ are expensive but because scientific and technological progress increases the opportunities for a larger part of the population.

Searching for escapes from the ‘‘algorithmic cage’’ of homo economicus, experimental and behavioral economics appear as a step towards the ‘‘whole breadth of reason’’ highlighting the role of interpersonal relation in human decisions and actions. We explore how individual choices, attitudes and traits change over a congruous period of time, due to exposure to an intense relational experience within a caring community. We apply a longitudinal empirical framework of analysis, encompassing behavioral games, textual analysis and psychological validated tests to three ongoing research projects at CSCC-UCSC, involving ex-addicted persons in Italian rehab communities; Californian state prisoners attending the GRIP program; and schoolchildren under AVSI Distance Support in Goma, DRC.

The paper explores the heterogeneity behind the production of innovation at the regional level. We empirically estimate the innovation equation with EU regional data using either patents or innovative sales in the region as dependent variable. The empirical model accounts for external, spillover, effects and allows for parameter heterogeneity among pre-selected groups of regions. Findings suggest that expenditures in Research & Development (R&D) lead to patents while non-R&D expenditures drive the innovative sales. For both types of expenditure, we find relatively weaker effects on innovation in the regions belonging to the New Member States and in Convergence regions but we find significant spillover effects. The evidence provides full support to the argument that a faster diffusion of knowledge can accelerate the process of technological convergence in Europe, but still draws a picture of the innovation Union characterized by a marked and persistent core-periphery pattern.

There is a general consensus, in Europe, in considering LTC public financing as a proxy of the resources committed to elderly care by each Government; the preciseness of this approximation depends on the extent to which LTC is representative of elderly care. We investigate this issue by estimating the resources spent on elderly LTC in Lombardy, an Italian region which, in terms of population, dimension, health care organization and economic development, could be compared to many European countries. Results highlight the absence of an appropriate method for assessing LTC elderly expenditure and suggest that the latter, as reported in international comparisons, is actually overestimated.

The labor world in recent decades has undergone profound changes: on different types of contractual relations, on technology, on changes in the workforce. The outcome of these changes is a new world of work, which often seems to be characterized by a strong push towards efficiency, and profit, push driven mainly by the logic of profit, often with little attention to ethics and to the needs of the human. The changes, therefore, seem to favor the economic sphere, with little consideration of their impact on wellbeing of workers. It’s increasingly felt the need to carry out a reorganization of the work, to make it functional to the achievement of the welfare in the working communities. It’s urgent to originate to new organizational forms to create good work and the wellbeing of workers in specific relational and organizational contexts: the worker’s wellbeing generates economic profit for the company and ‘‘general welfare’’.